Bees are good for everyone. Not only are they producing honey which is widely loved and was the main sweetener for millennia, honey also has valuable medical properties. But more importantly, bees are absolutely essential as pollinators, pollinating up to 80% of all cultivated crop plants. Without bees there would be no apples, no cherries, no peaches, no nuts, and no herbs. Without bees, life as we know it would be impossible.

Sheep produce useful and less useful things. Their wool is great for keeping us warm in the winter, and if slaughtered their mutton is tasty. Their poop can be useful as fertilizer, but it can also get greatly in the way when we step into it. And if there are fruit trees on a pasture where sheep are grazing, they will chew up their bark and leaves, and kill the trees in no time.

Leeches are parasites, that attach their suckers to their prey animal, and feed on the blood of their host. In the front of their mouth they have three teeth, which they slice through the skin of the host. Once attached, they use a combination of mucus and suction to stay attached to the skin of their host, while consuming their blood meal.  While leeches have been used for medical bloodletting at least for 2500 years, they carry parasites in their digestive system, and bacteria, viruses and other parasites from previous blood meals can survive within a leech for months and infect the next host.

There are also two-legged bees, sheep, and leeches.

Human bees are people who derive their joy and meaning in life from creating new things. It seems there is a subgroup of the overall population that draws particular pleasure from creating new things and gaining new insights. Researchers have found that for some people, creative insights, the “aha moment” triggers the same neural reward as when we eat delicious food, have an orgasm, or consume addictive substances. In other words, some people experience creative insights as intrinsically rewarding. This explains the puzzle solvers, starving artists, underpaid researchers, and innovators tinkering with new ideas in their garages. Typical bees might be inventors, authors, painters, sculptors, researchers, and engineers. But obviously not everybody draws intrinsic satisfaction from gaining creative insights. There is a large(r) part of the population that hates change, likes to be told what to do, and would like to keep everything as safe and solid as it “has always been in the good old times”. Those are the sheep.

Human sheep like to aggregate in large herds, and being with other sheep like them. They might get their neural rewards from being together in large flocks with other sheep and by getting recognition from other members of their herd. Sheep follow others, are being shorn by others, and in the end might be slaughtered – by the leeches described below. Leeches are different from bees and sheep by simply caring about getting as much money and power as possible, and do whatever it takes to grab it. Those are the leeches.

Human leeches are the people that are trying to profit from others, by bending the rules to their own advantage. Their goal in life is to amass as much money and power as possible by shearing the wool of sheep, and slaughtering them. They also consume the honey of the bees and profit from their pollination. Hedge fund managers, M&A bankers, and venture capitalists would be archetypical examples.

In the current Covid-19 world, bees would be the researchers developing opensource blueprints for respirators, and working on developing new vaccines and antibody tests. The sheep in the Covid-19 world are sharing cooking recipes, Covid-19 diaries and baby pictures as coping strategies for surviving uncertainty while hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Leeches in the Covid-19 world might be selling face masks for 400 times actual costs, or Covid-19 miracle cures. Little leeches might tack the “Covid-19” label to their products, giving whatever they have to sell the “cool” Covid-19 spin.

Obviously, the categorization of a person as a bee, sheep, or leech is a huge oversimplification. While the doctors caring for Covid19 patients, or Ebola victims are certainly bees, I would not give that label to a beauty surgeon. And the CEO of a pharmaceutical company is walking a thin line between optimizing the profitability of a Covid-19 test and making it available at an affordable price. In reality the world is neither black nor white, but somewhere in the middle. Therefore, we all possess attributes of all three categories, and are sometimes bees, frequently sheep, and if we get the opportunity, we might even behave like leeches.

Don’t be a leech! It’s ok to be a sheep, no harm done, but try to be a bee!